Connecting Technology and Business.

"Harley-Davidson Uses
Artificial Intelligence to Increase New York Sales Leads by 2,930%", reads an article in HBR this May. Today’s
leading organizations are using machine learning–based tools to automate
decision processes, and they’re starting to experiment with more-advanced uses
of artificial intelligence (AI) for digital transformation. AI is already
transforming web search, advertising, e-commerce, finance, logistics, media,
and more.

Here was the status of what
AI currently could do (as of November 2016) as per a founding Lead of the
Google Brain team:

Input

Response

Application

Picture

Are there human faces?

Photo tagging

Loan Application

Will they repay the loan?

Loan approvals

Ad plus user information

Will user click an ad?

Targeted online ads

Audio clip

Transcript of audio clip

Speech recognition

English sentence

French sentence

Language translation

Sensor from hard disk,
plane engine

Is it about to fail?

Preventive maintenance

Car camera and other
sensors

Position of other cars

Self-driving cars

Corporate investment in
artificial intelligence is predicted to triple in 2017, becoming a $100 billion
market by 2025. Last year alone saw $5 billion in machine learning venture
investment. In a recent survey, 30% of respondents predicted that AI will be
the biggest disruptor to their industry in the next five years. This will no
doubt have profound effects on the workplace.

Personalizing customer
service.The potential to improve customer service
while lowering costs makes this one of the most exciting areas of opportunity.
By combining historical customer service data, natural language processing, and
algorithms that continuously learn from interactions, customers can ask
questions and get high-quality answers. In fact, 44% of U.S. consumers already
prefer chatbots to humans for customer relations. Customer service
representatives can step in to handle exceptions, with the algorithms looking
over their shoulders to learn what to do next time around.

Improving customer loyalty
and retention. Companies can mine customer
actions, transactions, and social sentiment data to identify customers who are
at high risk of leaving. Combined with profitability data, this allows
organizations to optimize “next best action” strategies and personalize the
end-to-end customer experience. For example, young adults coming off of their
parents’ mobile phone plans often move to other carriers. Telcos can use
machine learning to anticipate this behavior and make customized offers, based
on the individual’s usage patterns, before they defect to competitors.

Hiring the right people. Corporate job openings pull in about 250 résumés apiece, and over half
of surveyed recruiters say shortlisting qualified candidates is the most
difficult part of their job. Software quickly sifts through thousands of job
applications and shortlists candidates who have the credentials that are most
likely to achieve success at the company. Care must be taken not to reinforce
any human biases implicit in prior hiring. But software can also combat human
bias by automatically flagging biased language in job descriptions, detecting
highly qualified candidates who might have been overlooked because they didn’t
fit traditional expectations.

Automating finance. AI can expedite “exception handling” in many financial processes. For
example, when a payment is received without an order number, a person must sort
out which order the payment corresponds to, and determine what to do with any
excess or shortfall. By monitoring existing processes and learning to recognize
different situations, AI significantly increases the number of invoices that
can be matched automatically. This lets organizations reduce the amount of work
outsourced to service centers and frees up finance staff to focus on strategic
tasks.

Measuring brand exposure. Automated programs can recognize products, people, logos, and more. For
example, advanced image recognition can be used to track the position of brand
logos that appear in video footage of a sporting event, such as a basketball
game. Corporate sponsors get to see the return on investment of their
sponsorship investment with detailed analyses, including the quantity,
duration, and placement of corporate logos.

Detecting fraud. The typical organization loses 5% of revenues each year to fraud. By
building models based on historical transactions, social network information,
and other external sources of data, machine learning algorithms can use pattern
recognition to spot anomalies, exceptions, and outliers. This helps detect and
prevent fraudulent transactions in real time, even for previously unknown types
of fraud. For example, banks can use historical transaction data to build
algorithms that recognize fraudulent behaviour. They can also discover
suspicious patterns of payments and transfers between networks of individuals
with overlapping corporate connections. This type of “algorithmic security” is
applicable to a wide range of situations, such as cybersecurity and tax
evasion.

Predictive maintenance. Machine learning makes it possible to detect anomalies in the
temperature of a train axel that indicate that it will freeze up in the next
few hours. Instead of hundreds of passengers being stranded in the countryside,
waiting for an expensive repair, the train can be diverted to maintenance
before it fails, and passengers transferred to a different train.

Smoother supply chains. Machine learning enables contextual analysis of logistics data to
predict and mitigate supply chain risks. Algorithms can sift through public
social data and news feeds in multiple languages to detect, for example, a fire
in a remote factory that supplies vital ball bearings that are used in a car
transmission.

Other areas where machine
intelligence could soon be commonly used include:

Career planning. Recommendations could help employees choose career paths that lead to
high performance, satisfaction, and retention. If a person with an engineering
degree wishes to run the division someday, what additional education and work
experience should they obtain, and in what order?

Drone- and satellite-based
asset management. Drones equipped with
cameras can perform regular external inspections of commercial structures, like
bridges or airplanes, with the images automatically analysed to detect any new
cracks or changes to surfaces.

Retail shelf analysis. A sports drink company could use machine intelligence, coupled with
machine vision, to see whether its in-store displays are at the promised
location, the shelves are properly stocked with products, and the product
labels are facing outward.

Machine learning enables a
company to reimagine end-to-end business processes with digital intelligence.
The potential is enormous. That’s why software vendors are investing heavily in
adding AI to their existing applications and in creating net-new solutions.

Office 365
is the fastest growing SaaS offering globally. It is also the most targeted by
hackers today as phishing and Ransomware transform into business models in the
Dark Web world. Breaches come from emails and misused identities and the
attacks only accelerate by the minute. It is high time that Office 365 admins
hack-proof their environments – and it is possible with the tools available
from Microsoft – tools for studying, analyzing, warning and preventing attacks
and plugging vulnerabilities.

The recent
Wannacry ransomware attack has created a sense of panic among enterprises using
Office 365; remember other cloud services too, are not immune to hacking
attacks. Attackers use Social engineering to gain access to the victim’s
identity, data and device. It is a security attack vector that involves
tricking someone into breaking normal security procedures.

A social
engineer runs what used to be called a "con game." Techniques such as
appeal to vanity, appeal to authority and appeal to greed are often used in
social engineering attacks. Many social engineering exploits simply rely on
people's willingness to be helpful. For example, the attacker might pretend to
be a co-worker who has some kind of urgent problem that requires access to
additional network resources.

Popular
types of social engineering attacks include:

Baiting: Baiting is when an attacker leaves a malware-infected physical device, such as a USB flash drive in a place it is sure to be found. The finder then picks up the device and loads it onto his or her computer, unintentionally installing the malware.

Phishing: Phishing is when a malicious party sends a fraudulent email disguised as a legitimate email, often purporting to be from a trusted source. The message is meant to trick the recipient into sharing personal or financial information or clicking on a link that installs malware.

Spear phishing: Spear phishing is like phishing, but tailored for a specific individual or organization.

Pretexting: Pretexting is when one party lies to another to gain access to privileged data. For example, a pretexting scam could involve an attacker who pretends to need personal or financial data in order to confirm the identity of the recipient.

Scareware: Scareware involves tricking the victim into thinking his computer is infected with malware or has inadvertently downloaded illegal content. The attacker then offers the victim a solution that will fix the bogus problem; in reality, the victim is simply tricked into downloading and installing the attacker's malware.

Security
experts recommend that IT departments regularly carry out penetration tests
that use social engineering techniques. This will help administrators learn
which types of users pose the most risk for specific types of attacks while
also identifying which employees require additional training. Security awareness
training can go a long way towards preventing social engineering attacks. If
people know what forms social engineering attacks are likely to take, they will
be less likely to become victims.

Exchange
Online Protection (EOP)

Microsoft
Exchange Online Protection (EOP) is a cloud-based email filtering service that
helps protect your organization against spam and malware, and includes features
to safeguard your organization from messaging-policy violations. EOP can
simplify the management of your messaging environment and alleviate many of the
burdens that come with maintaining on-premises hardware and software.

Protection against Unsafe Attachments - With Safe Attachments, admins can prevent malicious attachments from impacting the messaging environment, even if their signatures are not known. All suspicious content goes through a real-time behavioral malware analysis that uses machine learning techniques to evaluate the content for suspicious activity.

Unsafe attachments are sandboxed in a detonation chamber before being sent to recipients. The advantage is a malware free and cleaner inbox with better zero-day attack protection.

Protection of the environment when users click malicious links - Safe Links expands on EOP by protecting the O365 environment when users click a link. While the content is being scanned, the URLs are rewritten to go through Office 365. The URLs are examined in real time, at the time a user clicks them. URL detonation provides deeper protection against malicious URLs. Not only does Microsoft check a list of malicious URLs when a user clicks on a link, but Office 365 will also perform real-time behavioural malware analysis in a sandbox environment to identify malicious attachments. URL reputation checks are part of Advanced Threat Protection. If a link is unsafe, the user is warned not to visit the site or informed that the site has been blocked. Reporting is available, so administrators can track which users clicked a link and when they clicked it.

Dynamic delivery— Better performance and lower latency for emails with attachments. Users will see a placeholder while attachments are scanned in a sandbox environment. If deemed safe, attachments are re-inserted into the email.

Rich reporting and tracking links in messages — Gaining critical insights into who is being targeted in the organization and the category of attacks the organization is facing. Reporting and message trace allow admins to investigate messages that have been blocked due to unknown viruses or malware, while URL trace capability allows admins to track individual malicious links in the messages that have been clicked. Get better insights to malware activity. Security admins will have a new reporting dashboard to see details of malware that Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection is analyzing.

Intelligence sharing with Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection— Security admins will be able to see malware activity and relationships across Windows 10 and Office 365.

Threat Intelligence

The office 365 Threat Intelligence service provides information on security using data from various sources. The data is harvested via the Microsoft Intelligent security Graph technology. Organizations are being targeted with increasingly sophisticated attacks.

It also provides deep insights from cyber threat hunters to create a comprehensive view of malware trends around the world. In addition, Microsoft is integrating signals from Windows and Azure to help customers realize the full benefit of the Microsoft Cloud.

Security admins will see a dashboard with rich insights to do deep investigation of malware and will be able to integrate data with existing security management tools.

Threat Intelligence takes it a step further by alerting security admins and proactively creating and suggesting security policies to help protect against malware. For example, if analytics show that attacks are happening in the financial industry, the service will alert customers in finance and related areas to the trend. Threat Intelligence will also dynamically create and suggest additional security policies to help protect you before they get to
your network.

Advanced
Data Governance

Microsoft
has also brought Advanced Data Governance to Office 365 to help customers
manage the exploding volume and increasing complexity of corporate data. Microsoft
applies intelligence to help admins achieve organizational compliance and
automate data retention.

Enterprises
will be able to classify, set policy and take action on the data that is most
relevant for their organization and industry, with recommendations driven by
behavioral analysis and machine learning.

Advanced
Data Governance includes the following capabilities:

Import—Intelligently import only the data needed from on-premises and third-party archives using classifications such as age, data type, user or groups, sensitivity or importance.

Policies—Policy recommendations are provided, based on machine assisted insights of the data, classifications, tenant, organization, industry, geography and more. Recommendations may include delete, move, encrypt or share.

Retention—Intelligently preserve only what’s important to the organization by using classifications such as keywords, age, data type, user or group, sensitivity, importance. Integration with line-of-business systems allows admins to trigger retention based upon events, such as creation of a human resources record.

Advanced
Data Governance will help organizations apply the right actions to preserve
high value data and purge redundant or obsolete data.

Advanced
Security Management (ASM)

Microsoft
has launched Advanced Security Management to help give organizations visibility
and control over security in Office 365.

They
have added a new feature lately called Productivity App Discovery, which will
help IT pros and security operations teams understand their organization’s
usage of Office 365 and other productivity cloud services. This will help them
to better determine the extent to which shadow IT is occurring in their
organization.

Office 365 Secure
Score

The Office
365 Secure Score is available to help organization evaluate their security level
in Office 365. Secure Score analyzes an Office 365 organization’s security
based on their regular activities and security settings and assigns a score. It
is a credit score for security.

Secure
Score figures out what Office 365 services an organization is using (like
OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange) then looks at the settings and activities
and compares them to a baseline established by Microsoft. O365 admins get a
score based on how aligned they are with best security practices.

Using
Secure Score helps increase an organization’s security by encouraging them to
use the built-in security features in Office 365 (many of which they have
already purchased but might not be aware of). Learning more about these
features as they use the tool will help give them piece of mind that they are
taking the right steps to protect their organization from threats.

Bain’s Macro Trends Group estimates that global
financial capital has more than tripled over the past three decades and now
stands at roughly 10 times global GDP.

Indisputably, finding Financial capital is easy these days. It is superabundant. As its supply is far more than the demand, it is cheap. Skillful allocation of financial capital
is no longer a source of sustained competitive advantage for enterprises. There
is a scarcer resource that business owners don’t focus much on or track in
their annual balance sheets but which invariably has a greater impact on the
businesses - Human capital.

The assets that are in short supply at most companies are the
skills and capabilities required to translate good growth ideas into successful
new products, services, and businesses—and the traditional financially driven
approach to strategic investment has only compounded this paucity.

“Unemployability
is a bigger crisis than unemployment”, said an India Labour Report a decade
back and this still continues to be the challenge for the country which has
launched into the Make in India mode lately.

A country-wide survey found that only 25% of the Indian
professionals are considered “employable” by multinationals and the difficulty
of employers in India to fill job vacancies had increased to 67% in 2011. The
situation has only worsened ever since.

What
exactly are employers looking for? Personal attributes like a positive
attitude: a ‘can do’ approach, good work ethic and willingness to learn, good
personal presentation, honesty and integrity, reliability, timekeeping and
personal organization, team working, collaboration and co-operation, flexibility,
commercial awareness and customer focus are considered as essential skills.
Other skills include, communication – oral and written, numeracy and computer
literacy/IT skills.

While acquiring
human capital is a drastic challenge today, there is an urgent need for managing effectively the available human capital if enterprises intend to lead from the front. Unfortunately, unlike Financial capital where metrics like ROA, RONA, ROIC, ROCE, IRR, MVA, APV etc. are available for measurement, there are no significant measureable metrics to gauge the value, growth or decline of Human capital.

Broadly speaking, human
capital is the sum total of the time, talent and
energy of the workforce in an enterprise.

Technology to
the rescue - Office365 MyAnalytics

Microsoft MyAnalytics, can provide detailed reviews of how
we use time.

MyAnalytics is an application that analyzes data gathered
from user activities within Office 365 to provide users with an insight into
how they use their time dealing with email, attending meetings, and interacting
with key contacts. It is an information discovery and knowledge tool to track
your time, because that’s the valuable resource you have.

The concept underpinning MyAnalytics is that by observing
and understanding how someone interacts with the components of Office 365, you
can build up a picture of their day-to-day activities. You can also compare how
they spend their time against an anonymized set of data drawn from other tenant
users.

Based on data drawn from across Office 365, Microsoft knows that
the average office worker spends up to 20 hours per week working with email
while senior managers will be glued to their keyboards for between 40 and 70
hours. Your data might vary!

All of the data used by MyAnalytics is available to users if
they care to look. For example, it is possible (but tedious) to count the
number of messages you create and send. You can also figure out how much time
is taken to respond to other people within your company by looking at the
timestamps in message headers and calculating the difference between when a
message was sent and when a response was generated. The same is true when it
comes to analyzing the number of meetings you attend, who also attends, the
topics discussed, and the outcomes. You can assess whether meetings were
effective, ineffective, or just so-so.

MyAnalytics is included in the Office E5 plan. MyAnalytics
is also available as an add-on for the E1 and E3 plans.

A cloud
kitchen or a digital restaurant is a fast growing trend that has quickly
established itself as a formidable restaurant format. Internet-first
restaurants are stepping on the gas and companies such as Zomato, Swiggy and Fresh
Menu have already started grabbing a slice of this fast-growing sector.

So what
is cloud kitchen a.k.a Internet-first restaurant?

A cloud kitchen is basically a restaurant kitchen
that accepts incoming orders only through online ordering systems and offers no
dine-in facility. They just have a central kitchen that delivers food at
customer’s doorsteps.

The primary source of revenue for these internet
restaurants is through the various food ordering platforms, such as Swiggy, Food
Panda, Zomato, etc. Critical to their business model is a Point of Sales
software that accepts orders from multiple sources.

Food,
at the click of a button

Digital technologies are reshaping our daily
experiences as consumers and businesses, and these cloud kitchens are no
exception. They have the potential to redefine the contours of the restaurant
business. For example, take Swiggy, the trending food delivery app that has its
roots in Bengaluru. It was the first among the crowd in the cut throat market to
venture cloud kitchen in India. Swiggy has set up ‘The Bowl Company’ in
Bengaluru joining hands with the popular restaurateurs to offer a wide selection
where the restaurant need not have a physical presence.

Following this, Zomato has opened its first cloud
kitchen in the suburb of Delhi, Dwarka as a pilot for its new project, Zomato
Infrastructure Services, in which they provide their partner restaurateurs with
300 square feet of space and kitchen equipment. So, an aspiring chef has to
just walk in and cook on gas while Zomato takes care of the rest. This could be
a great opportunity for budding chefs and entrepreneurs.

The
secret sauce!

Inexpensive access to pervasive computing power via
cloud and mobile technologies is the secret sauce. Market reports indicate that
Swiggy’s technology stack comprises of Amazon (EC2, RDS, Cloudfront and
Route53) while Zomato’s technology stack also includes Amazon Route53. With cloud and mobile technology facilitating
online ordering, cloud kitchens suddenly seem like the only rational thing to
do to manage the high rentals and poor margins in the F&B industry.

Why is
this restaurant stuff important for my business?

Just as cloud and mobile technologies are
redefining a traditional industry, the ramifications are just as huge for any
other business. It’s no longer about “technology has no role to play in my
business”. Chances are, if you don’t know how technology can impact your
business, your competitor already does.

With a plethora of services provided by cloud, every
business can benefit - from SMBs to large enterprises; from education to
hospitality. The cloud is like this huge
switchboard where anyone can plug in and use it when they want to but they
don’t have to carry the switchboard, they just use the “service”. Gone are the
days of expensive, complex IT infrastructure which deterred many businesses
from taking advantage of technology.

The cloud allows you to focus on what you do best -
run your business. You can move from being a reactive business to a proactive
business that offers transformational products and services. The cloud is also
highly resilient, especially during these trying times.

For instance, during an unprecedented natural
disaster like Cyclone Vardha, which shut down many businesses, or even during a watershed day like Flipkart’s Big Billion Day, the cloud has played
knight in shining armor through its various features like instant
scalability, disaster recovery, backup & restore and many more. A survey
says 60% of SMBs pull the plug after a disaster but with the advent of cloud
technology, they could surely turn the tables and cope up equally with large
businesses in this uphill battle.

Your
technology GPS

At Quadra, we can help you plan and prioritize your
cloud journey by helping you formulate well defined business objectives, along
with a business and risk analysis that considers multiple dimensions such as
long term cost savings; data criticality, security and privacy concerns; audit
and assurance; and regulatory norms, right down to service provider agreement
review.

Our job is simple – we put the cloud to work for your business, and
free you from the complexity of choosing and managing multiple vendors. We aim
to let you do what you do best – run your business!

To start with, I should ask, Is your Business model ready
for disruption from digital transformation? No? Don’t be afraid! we’re here to
help you! The four megatrends, Social, Mobile, Big Data (Analytics) and
Cloud seems to have a clear positive Impact on today’s transforming world.
Digital transformation is occurring rapidly at almost all sectors. These four
technologies will not only boost efficiency and cut costs, it will help you craft
new business models.

Social – The easy
global reach:

You want to publish an ad and you select the medium as
paper. What is the people response on it? How many like it? How many don’t?
What are the suggestions from the end users? What are the expectations? Costs
incurred? Manpower Incurred?

Lots of questions with no answers in hand! Think about
Digital on Social Media – An ad can achieve
a global reach in seconds. No significant Manpower required, No high
investments, Immediate suggestions from customers.

You’ll have a wider scope of Improving things when you go on
Digital rather than going through any other medium.

The key capabilities of Social media are:

·Increased ability to effectively communicate
with customers

·Increased employee collaboration

·Improved ability to provide customer service

Mobile has become
a new norm:

The smartphone era is emerging like never before. A mobile
has become the true face of digital. Behind the scenes, we must cope up with
technology. The mobile has become the interface between your brand and your customer.
So, one must leverage the mobile to the max to accelerate the digital
transformation and also transform the customer experience you deliver.

So, to help increase productivity of your employees, give
them the luxury of working from anywhere whereas keeping your company data
secure. Make changes to your internal IT to provision a Bring Your Own
Device Environment.

A Real estate agency, Foxtons wanted to enhance employee
mobility by deploying smartphones that run the Windows Phone 8 operating system
and two productivity-boosting apps. But Foxtons needed to be able to remotely
manage and secure the devices. To deliver this solution, Foxtons subscribed to
the Windows Intune PC and mobile device management solution. Employees now use
their smartphones to conduct business from anywhere, furthering their
reputation for fast, attentive service.

The key benefits of using mobile devices and the LOB applications of
your company are:

·Access to corporate data from anywhere

·Increased Employee productivity

·Increased employee collaboration

Analytics:

Collect - Analyse – Identify – Decide is a way which we
follow unknowingly. And Yes, this is the key role to success anywhere.

Organizations today have the ability to process and analyse
large quantities of structured & unstructured data to generate real time
business insights. The amount of data that organizations have to analyse is set
to increase exponentially.

However, leading companies aren’t just integrating more data
into their analysis, they’re also using the results to develop new products and
services.

This is how most of the e-commerce sites will work. Their
key to success is to have different dimensional data and generate results by
using that.

The key benefits of using Analytics are:

·Integrate more data into decision making
processes

·Ability to generate faster insights

·Integrate desperate data sources into analysis

Cloud:

Only cloud has the ability to deliver flexible capacity as
needed.

Companies need to be agile, flexible and fast to meet
customer expectations. Cloud computing can be the key to that responsiveness. “We
have customers who give us 90 days to get something up and running,” observes a
user of the Cloud. “There’s no way I can do that in my traditional data centre.”
The public cloud delivers a time-to-market advantage that’s hard for
enterprises to beat. “We see a lot of traction with customers who have projects
that have a short window of time to deliver results,” says the user.

Heavy initial investments and massive operational costs is
something that IT is afraid of. With the agile built-in, flexible environment, cloud
helps you avoid that.

The stunning capabilities of cloud which helps you move faster:

·Flexibility: Ability to scale up & down on
demand

·Increased business agility: Ability to respond
quickly to new opportunities

·Lower costs / Pay as you go

Conclusion of
SMAC:

While it is clear that each of the technology has a
tremendous impact, it’s always good to deploy the integrated solutions to
achieve the greatest impact.

Any successful running business will have the SMAC concept
deployed.

For example, let’s take PayTm (My Favorite), an Indian
payment & e-commerce company. How quickly it coped up with the
demonetization effect. Started promoting (Social)
the payments bank. While the Indians were facing severe currency issues (Analytics), PayTm made India “Go
Cashless from mobile” (Mobility)
anywhere. Scan and Pay with no minimum purchase amount barriers. It helped the
merchants to do a smooth business and also the customers to go cashless. They
use a flexible environment on demand (Cloud).

Need to
insert an icon that conveys a certain ideaor concepts,, but you don't want to draw it
yourself? Microsoft has introduced a very easy and stylish way of doing this in
your Word documents or Presentation slides.

Check out
the Icons button on the Insert tab. Choose a category like
people, technology, or sports. Then click the icon that represents the idea or
concept you have in mind.

You have
25+ categories to choose icons from.

These Icons can be managed and manipulated
like any other graphic using the Graphics Tools that will appear as a contextual tab when
the icon is clicked.

Control provisioning of OneDrive

OneDrive for a user is created when they click on OneDrive tile or access the service first time. Their ability to create OneDrive site is governed by the create personal site permission in SharePoint Online. By default, the permission is assigned to all users.

If your Organization is looking for a phased rollout then you can create specific user groups and assign the create personal site permission to them.

Enable Sync client restrictions

SharePoint Online administrator can use PowerShell cmdlets to enable the OneDrive for Business sync client from only the domains present in the safe recipients list. After that, if the version of sync client on a user’s PC is earlier than 15.0.4693.1000, sync client is considered outdated and user will not be able to sync documents.

Configure restricted Domain sharing

At a tenant level, administrators can configure external sharing by using either the Allow List or Deny List feature. Administrators can limit sharing invitations to a limited number of email domains by listing them in the Allow List or opt to use the Deny List, listing email domains to which users are prohibited to extend invitations.

Additional parameters have been added to the PowerShell, to allow configuration of restricted domains using PowerShell.

All external sharing invitation emails will blind copied to set mailboxes using available parameters.

Discourage Org-wide sharing

To discourage users from sharing files from their OneDrive with everyone in the Organization, hide “Everyone”, “All Users” and “Everyone except External Users” groups in the people picker.

Restrict Sync based on file types

When required, block syncing of certain file types using the new sync client. For e.g. sync of .pst and .mp4 can be blocked as all emails should be in EXO mailbox and videos should be in O365 Videos service or, just to conserve bandwidth consumption.

Monitor User activities

Office 365 Audit log search and Management Activity APIs enable monitoring of user activities on OneDrive and also integrate them with existing SIEM tool in your Organization. Refer to the Audit log search section later in this document.

Configure usage or anomaly based alerts

Office 365 Advanced Security Management enables you to set up anomaly detection policies, so you can be alerted to potential breaches of your network. For example, you can be alerted to impossible travel scenarios, such as if a user signs in to the service to check their mail from New York and then two minutes later is downloading a document from OneDrive in Tokyo.

Advanced Security Management also lets you set up that can track specific activities. With out-of-the-box templates like Mass download by a single user, IT can easily create policies that flag when someone is downloading an unusually large amount of data. Alerts can also be for multiple failed sign-in attempts or signs in from a risky IP address.

Configure Conditional Access

Azure AD Premium, part of Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) suite, provides Risk-based conditional access through an intelligent assessment of granting or blocking access to OneDrive. For e.g. access to OneDrive can be blocked is the user is using non-managed device.

Additional Administrative settings for the sync client

A variety of OneDrive and OneDrive for Business settings can be centrally administered through group policy. The group policy objects are available as part of the OneDrive Deployment Package.

The following User Configuration group policies are available:• Coauthoring and in-app sharing for Office files • Configure OneDrive.exe to receive updates after consumer production • Prevent users from changing the location of their OneDrive folder • Prevent users from configuring personal OneDrive accounts • Set the default location for the OneDrive folder • Users can choose how to handle Office files in conflict The following Computer Configuration group policies are available:• Prevent users from using the remote file fetch feature to access files on the computer • Set the maximum percentage of upload bandwidth that OneDrive.exe uses

The cloud offers many security benefits to
organizations, but also raises new security considerations. It can also add to
existing ones such as shadow IT, the use of software that is not formally
sanctioned by the organization. Office 365 Advanced Security Management,
a new set of capabilities powered by Microsoft Cloud App Security gives you greater visibility and control over your
Office 365 environment.

Discovery and insights - Get enhanced visibility into your Office 365 usage and shadow IT
without installing an end point agent.

Threat Detection

Advanced Security Management enables you to
set up anomaly detection policies, so you can be alerted to potential
breaches of your network. Anomaly detection works by scanning user
activities and evaluating their risk against over 70 different indicators,
including sign-in failures, administrator activity and inactive accounts. For
example, you can be alerted to impossible travel scenarios, such as if a user
signs in to the service to check their mail from New York and then two minutes
later is downloading a document from SharePoint Online in Tokyo.

Advanced Security Management also leverages
behavioral analytics as part of its anomaly detection to assess
potentially risky user behavior. It does this by understanding how users
typically interact with Office 365, spotting anomalies and giving the anomalous
activity a risk score to help IT decide whether to take further action.

Enhanced Control

Advanced Security Management lets you set
up activity policies that can track specific activities. With
out-of-the-box templates, IT can easily create policies that flag when someone
is downloading an unusually large amount of data, has multiple failed sign-in
attempts or signs in from a risky IP address. Policies can also be customized
to your environment. Using activity filters, IT can look for the location of a
user, device type, IP address or if someone is granted admin rights. Alerts can
be created to notify an IT lead immediately via email or text message.

Default activity policy templates that
are included:

Administrative activity from
a non-administrative IP address Alert when an admin
user performs an administrative activity from an IP address that is not
included in a specific IP range category.

User logon from a
non-categorized IP address Alert when a user logs
on from an IP address that is not included in a specific IP range category.

Mass download by a single
user Alert when a single user performs more than 30
downloads within 5 minutes.

Multiple failed user log on
attempts to an app Alert when a single user
attempts to log on to a single app, and fails more than 10 times within 5
minutes.

Logon from a risky IP
address Alert when a user logs on from a risky IP
address to your sanctioned services. The Risky IP category contains, by
default, anonymous proxies and TOR exits point.

After reviewing an alert and investigating
a user’s activities, IT may deem that the behavior is risky and want to stop
the user from doing anything else. This can be done directly from the alert.
Some activities may be deemed so risky that IT may want to immediately suspend
the account. To help with this, IT can configure the activity policy so that an
account is automatically suspended if that risky activity takes place.

Advanced Security Management also shows
which apps are connected to Office 365 in their environment, who is using
them and the permissions they have. For example, if a user grants a scheduling
application access to their Office 365 calendar data, IT will be able to see
the details of the connection and revoke that application’s permissions with
one click if they deem it a security risk.

Discovery and Insights

Advanced Security Management also provides
an app discovery dashboard that allows IT Pros to visualize your
organization’s usage of Office 365 and other productivity cloud services, so
you can maximize investments in IT-approved solutions. With the ability to
discover about 1,000 applications in categories like collaboration, cloud
storage, webmail and others, IT can better determine the extent to which shadow
IT is occurring in your organization. Advanced Security Management will also
give you details about the top apps in each category. For example, you can see
how much data is being sent to OneDrive for Business, Box, Dropbox and other
cloud storage providers.

You can do all this without installing
anything on device end points. To load the data into the dashboard, all you
have to do is take the logs from your network devices and upload them via an
easy-to-use interface.

Many organizations allow users to connect
apps to Office 365 without IT intervention to help them be more productive. The
challenge is that it reduces the visibility and control that IT has over what
apps are doing with the data. App Permissions as part of Office 365
Advanced Security Management can help mitigate that risk.

App Permissions provides information to IT
about which applications in their network have access to Office 365 data, what
permissions they have and which users granted these apps access to their Office
365 accounts.

Based on this information, IT admins can
choose to approve the app or revoke its access to Office 365. If they choose to
revoke permissions to the app, it will no longer be able to access the
information for any of the users in the Office 365 tenant. App Permissions also
makes it easy for IT admins to notify users who have installed the application
that is going to be banned.

Office 365 Videos is an intranet website
portal where people in your organization can post and view videos. It's a
streaming video service for your organization that's available with SharePoint
Online in Office 365. It's a great place to share videos of executive
communications or recordings of classes, meetings, presentations, or training
sessions.

You can have channels for particular subjects, for example, or for specific groups such as departments or teams

You see only the channels that you have permission to view

Uploading videos

To upload a video, you upload it to a specific channel.

You can upload multiple videos to a channel at the same time.

Anyone in your organization who has edit permission for a particular channel can upload videos to it

Editing information about a video

Providing information about a video will make it easier for other people to find it through search, and will provide additional context for it in Delve and the Office Graph.

You have to have owner or editor permission for the channel that the video is in

Owner and people metadata

Office 365 Video also shows who uploaded the video and the various people who are in the video.

This enhances the discoverability of the video and highlights the main speakers; it, too, enhances when and how your videos appear in other users’ Delve activity feeds pivoting off of the relevant context of who knows who

Changing a thumbnail for a video

After a video you've uploaded
to Office 365 Video has been processed and is ready to play, you can add a
custom thumbnail for the video or you can choose from one of the auto-generated
thumbnails provided.

Add subtitles or captions

Subtitles or captions are lines of text that appear at the bottom of a video and provide a transcript of the audio portion of the video

You can add subtitles or captions to any video by uploading one or more subtitle or caption files

Enhance HR practices. Reduce cost and initial training cycles for new employees by
creating a designated group with the onboarding resources they need, while
giving them access to subject matter experts across the organization.

Extend the reach of IT. Speed end-user adoption by sharing tips and tricks for new
products. Enable self-help, access to peer expertise, and a searchable
knowledge base to reduce total time to problem resolution.

Transform Your HR Organization

An engaged workforce means good things for
your company’s HR and Corporate Communications Organizations. With Yammer,
employees feel empowered to make a difference by contributing to recruiting
efforts, recognizing peer performance, and learning from experts throughout the
company or industry. Yammer increases employee engagement by giving every team
member a voice and the tools and information to do more.

Onboard new hires quickly. Enable new hires to ramp up faster and continue to develop their
skills over time as they learn from their peers.

Recognize top talent. Identify high performers and publicly recognize employees who do
great work - increasing engagement, satisfaction, and retention.

Gain insight into
performance. Keep up to date with what your team is
working on and the progress made.

Start a company dialogue. Connect with your coworkers and encourage two-way dialogues in order
to improve communication among teams, employees, managers, and executives.

Give employees a voice. Spark creativity and innovation by allowing all employees to share
ideas, offer feedback and help drive business results.

Transform Your Marketing Organization

Collaboration across teams and with
customers is critical to your organization’s marketing success. With Yammer,
you can engage with agencies to build high-impact campaigns across geographies,
share customer insights, and drive refined go-to market strategies. You can
also improve execution through real-time collaboration of collateral. Empower
your employees to become brand ambassadors and strengthen your competitive
position with Yammer.

Centralize information. Create one
workspace where designated teams can sync up and get projects done.

Accelerate collateral
development. Develop quality collateral much faster
and in real-time with colleagues, ensuring that the salesforce is always
equipped with the latest materials.

Create brand ambassadors. Easily ensure employees and partners are aligned with company
messaging and positioning.

Empower Your Sales Organization

Finding the right information at the right
time is critical to the success of your sales team. With Yammer, sales
representatives can tap into the collective knowledge of your organization to
close deals quickly and increase customer retention. Empower your teams to
instantly access expertise and information, gain a competitive advantage, and
secure deals faster.

Access and share key
information. Quickly distribute the latest key
messaging out to the entire field.